This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Concurrency Theory, CONCUR 2008, held in Toronto, Canada, August 19-22, 2008.

The 33 revised full papers presented together with 2 tool papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 120 submissions. The topics include model checking, process calculi, minimization and equivalence checking, types, semantics, probability, bisimulation and simulation, real time, and formal languages.

If a physical system has only internal interactions and if space is isotropic, then intrinsic properties of the system must be independent of its orientation and must be indistinguishable in all directions. From this fundamental rotational symmetry concept the theory of angular momentum has been developed into a sophisticated analytical and computational technique, especially when applied to quantum mechanics. I aim in this book to develop angular momentum theory in a pedagogically consistent way, starting from the geometrical concept of rotational invariance rather than from the dynamical idea of orbital angular momentum and its quantization. The latter approach, though hallowed by tradition, needlessly confuses quantum mechanics with geometry.

Topics are presented in an order so that new concepts are introduced and relevant formulas are derived in ways arising naturally in the treatment rather than by appealing to unfamiliar concepts or ud hoc methods. Modern notation and terminology are used in a geometric and algebraic approach. Some concepts of group theory are introduced and are related to this approach, but knowledge of group theory is not required. Those who plan to use continuous groups that are more abstract than the rotation group may thereby develop their insight and skills by practicing with rotations. I try to distinguish carefully results that depend only on rotational symmetry and are generally valid from those having their most fruitful interpretation from the viewpoint of quantum mechanics. Applications to quantum mechanics therefore usually appear toward the end of sections and chapters.

This book is addressed to business management and project managers as well as researchers who are evaluating the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) for tracking uniquely identified objects. In an effort to make RFID project management less of an art form and more of a science RFID Technology and Applications brings together pioneering RFID academic research principals to analyze engineering issues that have hampered the deployment of RFID and to share ‘‘best practices’’ learnings from their work. By extending the original work of the Auto-ID Center at MIT and the subsequent Auto-ID Labs consortium led by MIT that now comprises seven world-renowned research universities on four continents, this book seeks to establish a baseline for what RFID technology works today and identifies areas requiring research on which other researchers in academic, commercial, and regulatory agencies can build.

The researchers represented in these pages have gathered on three continents in the course of the RFID Academic Convocations, a research collaboration hosted by the Auto-ID Labs that started in January of 2006, at MIT, and was followed by events co-hosted with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Auto-ID Labs at Fudan University in Shanghai, as RFID Live! 2007 pre-conference events, and by the event in Brussels organized with the European Commission Directorate-General for Informatics (DGIT) and the Auto-ID Labs at Cambridge University. These Convocations bring together academic researchers with industry representatives and regulatory stakeholders to collaborate across disciplines and institutions to identify challenges faced by industry in adopting RFID technology. As summarized by Robert Cresanti, Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology, United States Department of Commerce in his remarks that day, ‘‘the two primary challenges facing this new technology are standards and interoperability issues across various RFID systems, companies, and countries,
and privacy and security concerns.’

Recent advancement and increased growth in Web technologies have resulted in an even greater need for more efficient scheduling and data transmission strategies. An increased reliance on wireless communications devices, with their constraint issues, has further complicated the problem. While both push and pull strategies provide certain solutions, each has limitations that compromise performance. What is becoming clear is that any optimal solutions will require novel push-pull hybrid approaches.

Data Scheduling and Transmission Strategies in Asymmetric Telecommunications Environments helps systems architects and engineers take on this challenge by providing a thorough discussion of major data and scheduling and transmission strategies. Written by two highly respected pioneering researchers, this work takes a comparative and practical approach that incorporates much of the authors’ original research.

They discuss basic push and pull strategies and examine the challenges posed by customer requests and behavior, before defining ideal hybrid strategies. Exceptionally thorough in this practical approach, they demonstrate the value of separating clients by class and introduce the concept of an importance factor to properly prioritize a system. They also look at a new on-line hybrid solutions for multichannel broadcast problems and go on to address future problems that are likely to remain open.

For those seeking to extract the best performance out of data transmission schemes in asymmetric environments, this invaluable resource is unparalleled in its depth of coverage and innovation.

Coming to web development with a blank slate can be pretty intimidating. There are a lot of things to learn about the proper construction of a website. The most successful websites have a great deal of thought and work put into them before they’re even put into production.

Although it can be scary, there has never been a better time to get started than the present. Web browsers are finally starting to reach a point where they all follow standards (more or less). You have to do less fiddling with things to get them working properly now than ever before. We don’t want to jinx it, but we think we can finally start letting our guard down a bit and start trusting browser manufacturers more (yes, even Microsoft).

Proceedings of the First Intl Conference on Web-Based Learning in China, held August 17-19, 2002 in Hong Kong. An up to date study of technical, pedagogical and managerial issues in Web-based learning. Softcover.

Nowadays, our society has entered into the information age, in which people intend to acquire the information as quickly as possible. The widely used World Wide Web can be featured by the high availability in Internet, short learning time in using the graphic interface browsers and open standard, and portability between different operating systems and platforms. The information released in the Internet is no longer limited to text and graphics as normally presented in the conventional textbooks. The linked material could be in a variety of formats including sound, picture, video, 3-D modeling, animation or application. When new packages of educational materials are developed, these characteristics are capable to enhance the feasibility of the standard HyperText Markup Language (HTML) generally used in the World Wide Web [1].

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology, AMAST 2008, held in Urbana, IL, USA, in July 2008.

The 28 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. Among the topics covered are all current issues in formal methods related to algebraic and logical foundations, software technology, and to programming methodology including concurrent and reactive systems, evolutionary software/adaptive systems, logic and functional programming, object paradigms, constraint programming and concurrency, program verification and transformation, programming calculi, specification languages and tools, formal specification and development case studies, logic, category theory, relation algebra, computational algebra, algebraic foundations for languages and systems, coinduction, theorem proving and logical frameworks for reasoning, logics of programs, as well as algebra and coalgebra.

The book presents mechanisms, protocols, and system architectures to achieve end-to-end Quality-of-Service (QoS) over heterogeneous wired/wireless networks in the Internet. Particular focus is on measurement techniques, traffic engineering mechanisms and protocols, signalling protocols as well as transport protocol extensions to support fairness and QoS. It shows how those mechanisms and protocols can be combined into a comprehensive end-to-end QoS architecture to support QoS in the Internet over heterogeneous wired/wireless access networks. Finally, techniques for evaluation of QoS mechanisms such as simulation and emulation are presented.

The book is aimed at graduate and post-graduate students in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering with focus in data communications and networking as well as for professionals working in this area.

This book contains the final reports of 19 workshops held during the 20th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, ECOOP 2006, held in Nantes, France in July 2006.

The 19 reports cover the entire range of object technology and related topics. Their contents was provided by the respective workshops organizers and picked out in a twofold selection process. Thus the reports present a coherent and highly representative snapshot of the major trends in the field.

This year, for the eighth time, the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) series, in cooperation with Springer, is glad to offer the object-oriented research community the ECOOP 2004 Workshop Reader, a compendium of workshop reports pertaining to the ECOOP 2004 conference, held in Oslo from June 15 to 19, 2004.

ECOOP 2004 hosted 19 high-quality workshops covering a large spectrum of hot research topics. These workshops were chosen through a tight peer review process following a specific call for proposals ending on November 30, 2003. We are very grateful to the members of the Workshop Selection Committee for their careful reviews and hard work to put together the excellent workshop program.

We also want to thank all submitters, accepted or not, to whom the workshop program equally owes its quality. This selection process was then followed by a selection of workshop participants, done by each team of organizers based on an open call for position papers. This participant selection process ensured that we gathered the most active researchers in each workshop research area, and therefore a fruitful working meeting.

Following the tradition of the ECOOP Workshop Reader, we strove for high quality, value-adding and open-ended workshop reports. The result, as you can judge from the following pages, is a thought-provoking snapshot of the current research
in object-orientation, full of pointers for further exploration of the coveredtopics. We want to thank our workshop organizers who, despite the additional burden, did a great job in putting together these reports.

Each report you will find in this volume provides you with a starting point to understand and explore the currently debated issues in each area of concern. To achieve this, after summarizing the workshop goals, each report offers a critical summary of the participants’ position papers as well as a transcript of the actual debates aroused by the talks. You will also find the full list of participants, with contact information, as well as the list of contributed position papers. Several of the reports also add a list of relevant publications and Web sites, including the workshop home page, where you will usually find the contributed position papers themselves as well as other material that goes into each covered topic more closely.

Finally, as editors, we harmonized the report titles to mention only the topics of the workshops and to avoid repeated references to ECOOP 2004. However, each workshop report should be referenced as “Report from the ECOOP 2004 Workshop on ...” where you fill in the blanks with the workshop title.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Graph Transformation, ICGT 2004, held in Rome, Italy, in September/October 2004.

The 26 revised full papers presented together with three invited contributions and summaries of 2 tutorials and 5 workshops were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on integration technology, chemistry and biology, graph transformation concepts, DPO theory for high-level structures, analysis and testing, graph theory and algorithms, application conditions and logic, transformation of special structures, and object-orientation.